Laure Thompson


Research Software Engineer
Center for Digital Humanities
Princeton University

Office: B-9 H-4 Firestone Library
Email: laurejt at princeton.edu

I am a research software engineer at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton where I work in the areas of natural language processing and cultural analytics. I build tools and create methodologies that enable scholars to use machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical methods for studying humanities collections at scale.

My research focuses on the affordances of computational methods for humanities scholarship. In particular, I focus on understanding what computational models can learn and how we can intentionally change what they learn. I work with a wide range of cultural heritage corpora: from texts of science fiction novels and medieval manuscripts to images of avant-garde journals and magical gems from the ancient Mediterranean.

Previously, I was an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Sciences at UMass Amherst. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University where I was advised by David Mimno. I received my B.S. from the University of Washington in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.